STONE BELLY
Created, choreographed, written, and co-composed by Marie Lloyd Paspe
Performed by Ching-I Chang, treya lam, Paulina Meneses, Marie Lloyd Paspe, and Sugar Vendil

Installation by Ching-I Chang and Marie Lloyd Paspe
Music composed and performed live by treya lam and Sugar Vendil
Contributing choreography by Ching-I Chang and Paulina Meneses
Lighting designed by Serena Wong

STONE BELLY is a dance-theater performance centering the resilient mythology of babaylans and teachings of land-based healers from the Philippines. Babaylans — women and trans shamanic healers — were our precolonial leaders, whose traditions still persist today, called by different names. Based on Visayan legend, Spanish colonizers cut our babaylans’ bodies and fed them to the crocodiles. In their bellies, the babaylan spirit survived.

Through explosive choreography, expansive original live music, and environment of discarded materials made by Chang and Paspe, STONE BELLY re-imagines this myth in the belly of the diaspora. Generations later, fragments are stuck in the myth or biography of a belly, forever or only for a second. Rope and ribbon, spleen and intestine, ripped and shredded. BABAE—neither grandmother, mother, or daughter—cross-contaminate timelines, trying to remember, re-member.